


Refrain

by TheDarknessFactor



Series: This Won't End With A Whimper [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Blood, F/M, Gen, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, Mentions of Sensory Deprivation, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), mentions of torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-18
Updated: 2016-03-18
Packaged: 2018-05-27 13:52:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6287176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheDarknessFactor/pseuds/TheDarknessFactor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha regained her memories in the worst possible way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Refrain

**Author's Note:**

> The title is inspired, in part, by Code Geass - Refrain was a drug that was caused the user to relive their happiest memories.
> 
> This takes place shortly after 'The Guest is a Menace'. Basically, there's a little bit more setup for Age of Ultron - and an explanation for why Natasha seemed to remember everything in that movie, even though she didn't remember everything in Drip.
> 
> I know this is out of order. My bad.
> 
> Hope you guys like it!

Natasha almost dropped her glass.

There was no particular reason for it.  She just fumbled with it while she took it down from the shelf, her finger slipping over the rim.  Her reflexes caught on before it could become a loud, potentially bloody mess, but what she had instead was a glass caught in the crook of her elbow.  She stared at it for a few moments, feeling uncharacteristically unnerved.

Next to her, Bruce glanced over.

“You okay?”

Natasha used her elbow to set the glass down on the counter, artfully uncorking the bottle of wine and filling the seven or so other glasses.  She paused before the one she’d almost dropped, but ended up pouring the same amount with her usual precision.

“Fine,” she finally answered, sending him a small smile and passing him one of the glasses.  “Everyone else has to come get theirs.  We don’t get paid to sit on our asses.”

“I kinda feel like what we _do_ get paid for merits us sitting on our asses,” Tony called from his place on the couch. 

Sharon was the first one to make it to the counter, leaning against it on Natasha’s other side.  She seemed as content to stay there are Natasha herself was, but she left a space between the two of them so that the others could come and get their drinks.  Bruce nudged Natasha with an elbow, nodding at Pepper, who sat on the couch next to Tony with a glassy look in her eyes.

“Exhaustion,” Natasha murmured to him.  “She’s been dealing with lawyers all day.  About the latest clean-up.”

“I thought Maria was supposed to handle that?”

“She handles _Avengers_ clean-ups.”

“Tony?”

“Actually, no,” Natasha replied thoughtfully.  Thor was the last to pick up his glass, giving the substance inside a dubious look; Sharon moved closer to listen in on the conversation.  “Accident at one of the labs in California.  Just a normal, horrible tragedy.  It hasn’t been a great day for anyone in the SI family.  My guess is that she’ll be the first one to leave the party.”

“Hmm.”  Bruce frowned.  “Does Tony know?”

Natasha looked at him, and then over at where Tony was trying to coax Pepper into letting him give her a foot rub.  “Does that answer your question?”

Sharon shifted next to her.  Natasha turned her head to see her giving the wine bottle a longing stare. 

“No,” she said flatly.  For good measure, she snatched the wine glass out of Sharon’s hand.  “It’s bad enough that Bruce caved into letting you have one.”

“Technically she’s safe from any side effects with just one,” Bruce put in.

Natasha sent him a you’re-not-helping glare.  He raised his hands in surrender, though the corner of his mouth was twitching a bit, like he knew that she wasn’t really angry with him.  Natasha sort of hated that she wasn’t able to stay mad at him for very long, especially when he was actually relaxed enough to be playful and— not happy, per se, but content, at the very least.  She settled for elbowing him lightly in the stomach.  He responded by pretending to be in his death throes for a moment.

“Don’t forget the other part of our deal,” he warned Sharon a moment later.  “You have to wait an extra two hours before you take your meds.”

“That’ll be fine,” Sharon assured him.  “It hasn’t been that bad for a while now.  Just if I jostle it a certain way.”

Week five into recovery, and Sharon had been reduced to a restless mess.  She’d all but begged Maria and Pepper for things to do, and had been relegated to doing some digging on the Internet, looking for potential locations of the scepter.  Natasha could empathize— she’d done her fair share of being holed up on hospitals and medical wards— but she had had the advantage of healing faster.  Sharon, on the other hand, had fallen off a building and (by some miracle) didn’t die.  Her time to heal was a bit longer.

Ordinarily, she would’ve declined an invitation to one of Stark’s parties.  This time, however, owing to it being a smaller occasion and Sharon having a visceral need to get out of her apartment, she’d been only too happy to tag along with Natasha, wearing a summer dress and leggings. 

After a few moments of silence, Sharon wandered away to join in the conversation with the rest of the Avengers, leaving Natasha and Bruce to look on.

“Good day today?” Bruce asked.

It had started with almost crashing into a cyclist and ended with almost dropping a wine glass, but in the middle of that… “Yeah,” she answered.  “Pretty good day.  You?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“How’s Veronica?”

“Fine, it’s… we ran into some snags.”

“Bound to happen,” Natasha pointed out.  “Even with the dynamic duo working on it together.”

“I thought that that was you and Clint?”

“Can you honestly see either of us as Batman?”

Bruce scrunched up his face, pretending to think for a moment.  “I dunno.  Sharon told me that you _did_ spend a lot of time brooding while you were in Europe…”

Natasha made a face and called out, “Tattle!”

“Whatever it was, I did nothing,” Sharon called back.

Natasha didn’t think she’d ever been that tempted to kick someone.  The problem was, the person she wanted to kick was out of reach and still injured, and Bruce wasn’t really an acceptable substitute in this case.  She settled for pouring herself another glass and making eye contact with Sharon while she took a sip.

“Now _that’s_ mean-spirited,” Bruce chided.

“You want some?”

“Sure.”

“Pour it yourself.”

“Heartbreaker,” he accused, but obliged anyway.  Natasha didn’t think that he had the right to be so easy to talk to, but alas, these days it was more difficult for her not to hold conversation with Bruce Banner. 

She had to pause for a moment, staring once again at her glass.  She hadn’t been watching the angle at which she’d been holding it, and for a moment she’d thought the wine was going to spill out of the glass, spattering the floor like a bloodstain.  She shook herself to get the disturbing image out of her head, realizing that Bruce had started speaking again.

The evening passed by more quickly than she would’ve liked, but she went with the flow, drifting in and out of conversations with practiced ease.  She almost got sucked into a debate with Maria and narrowly avoided being part of a drinking competition with Thor, Steve, and Stark.  Rhodes hooted with laughter the entire time, while Thor spent the entire thing with a smug, satisfied look on his face. 

Steve looked completely innocent, but he downed glass after glass and didn’t even break a sweat.

Pepper, as she predicted, was the first to retire, excusing herself in a strained voice.  Stark went so far as to forfeit the competition only a minute later so that he could follow her.  Steve was next, claiming that he needed to be up early for a morning run with Sam while he was still in town.  Natasha made a mental note to ask to talk to Sam before he left.

“I’m putting in a veto for ‘Avengers Talk Shit’ now,” Maria said.  Natasha blinked, wondering which conversation she’d been missing out on.

“’Avengers Talk Crap’ just doesn’t have the same ring to it,” Clint replied, shaking his head sadly.  “We could put in a rotation for the person who has posting privileges.  Think about it— the world would start to see us as real people instead of infallible heroes all the time.  Imagine if half of the stuff that came out of Stark’s mouth went online.”

Bruce shook his head.  “Half of the stuff that Tony says already makes it online,” he pointed out.

“Some of us still rely on anonymity, Clint,” Maria reminded him.

“What anonymity?” he grumbled.

“The kind that JARVIS and I worked very hard to get for certain people in this room.”

“So the wig I’ve been wearing when I’ve gone grocery shopping has been pointless, then?” Natasha asked.  “What’s this about?”

Bruce sighed, but Maria leaned forward.  “It’s a publicity agenda that Stark’s been pushing for the last few months.  He thinks that if we create a Twitter account and allow the team to post on it, it’ll endear you all to the world, or something.  Personally I’m of the opinion that all it will do is solidify just how big of idiots some of you are.”

Sharon coughed in a way that sounded suspiciously like, “All.”

Putting aside Stark’s usual inability to prevent a mix of word vomit and jokes that belonged in the sewers aside, it wasn’t actually a bad idea.  It would almost certainly be a disaster if anyone besides the combination of Maria Hill and Pepper Potts were running it, but with the right amount of censorship, it could spike their public opinion.  Granted, it had been on the rise since the incident with Natasha being accused of killing two C.I.A. agents was smoothed over, but it wouldn’t hurt if it would rise faster.

Still… “ _You’re_ not naming it,” she told Clint.

“Damn.”

Maria was drawn away by work instead of the call of her bed.  Clint was interrupted by his ringtone and waved goodbye to them as he left the lounge.  Thor and Sharon had an enthusiastic back-and-forth about Asgardian and Earth holidays for a little while, but he excused himself once that topic fizzled out.

When it was just the three of them, it was even harder for Natasha to have any kind of guard up.  She brush her hand across Bruce’s when the opportunity arose, and was pleased when he didn’t seem to mind.  Sharon’s shrewd look told her that her movements weren’t going unnoticed, but she had never pressed the matter before and clearly wasn’t intending to start now. 

She liked the little niche she had built, among this ragtag team of misfits.  She had Clint and Laura, of course, but she had never before attempted to branch out and connect with others without prompting from someone else first. 

“Want more?” Bruce asked, nodding to her empty glass.

“No thanks,” she replied, getting up to take it to the kitchen.  She made it a few paces away from the couches before a crunching noise stopped her, followed by an unexpected spike of pain.  Frowning, she looked down.

The glass was no longer whole— just a pile of shards, many of which were digging into her palm.  She heard Bruce’s voice, tinged with alarm, but it seemed to her as though it was coming through water.  She looked up, expecting to see the kitchen, but was instead faced with a small room.  In the center was a chair, the sight of which made her hand spasm and sent the glass fragments in deeper.

“Natalia?”

She turned her head to see a younger Yelena’s frightened face.

“Natalia?” she asked again.

Natasha faced forward again and had to repress her flinch.  Madame B. stood in front of the chair now.

“We must begin now, my dear,” she warned.

Next to her she sensed Yelena nod.  It was the only warning she had.

* * *

“We need to get you to the infirmary.  The glass can’t stay in your hand.”

Natasha stared back at him, but she didn’t respond.  Her right hand was curled around the remains of her wine glass.  She didn’t seem to even hear what he said, so he repeated it as Sharon came to stand next to him.  This time Natasha looked away, back at the kitchen, before something like horror dawned in her eyes.

Sharon shoved him to the floor before he could do anything else, and he looked up in time to see Natasha make a wild swipe at Sharon’s face, raking the glass shards across her skin.  Blood started to well into the cuts almost immediately, but Sharon managed to shove her hand away before she could get at her eyes.  She tucked herself into a backwards rolled away from Natasha, jumping to her feet as Natasha used the sharpened stem of the glass to slash at her wildly.  Sharon deflected the next few attacks before Natasha caught her in her thigh, embedding the glass inside.

Sharon’s pained yell broke Bruce out of his shocked stupor, and he scrambled away toward the bar, where he knew Natasha kept one of her handguns.  Natasha was completely focused on Sharon, who clearly couldn’t hold out for long, if her stiffened movements were any indication.  He fumbled with the grip for a moment before he took a chance and shouted.

“Catch!”

Sharon succeeded in kicking Natasha away from her in time for her to grab the gun out of the air, aiming it at Natasha.  She fired warning shots at Natasha’s feet, but Natasha danced away as though they were playing dodge ball.  Her eyes darted between the two of them before she demanded something in Russian.

“She’s having a flashback,” Sharon said.  “She’ll be able to come out of it.”

There wasn’t as much confidence in her voice as Bruce would’ve liked to hear.

Natasha repeated whatever it was she said more loudly.  When it was clear that neither of them would (could) answer, she dove for Sharon, who swore and fired at Natasha’s shoulder.  Natasha somehow managed to twist out of the way, reminding Bruce of the way a cobra lashed out when it struck.  Sharon stumbled backwards, shoving him along with her, before she kicked out, catching Natasha in the abdomen.

“ _Go_!” yelled Sharon, whipping around and shoving him towards the elevator. 

They ran full-pelt, not daring to look back.  “Jarvis, put this floor on lockdown!” Bruce shouted.

“Shall I alert the other Avengers?”

“Yes!”

He pushed Sharon past the elevator doors and in the direction of his lab, where he was hoping the door would be enough to stop Natasha from getting in.  The glass had a triple bulletproof glaze, owing to the various explosions that took place inside the lab.

Sharon held the door for him when he raced past her, then threw herself back out and collided with Natasha.  There was a smack, and Bruce turned around in time to see Sharon’s elbow collide with Natasha’s head.  Natasha barely looked perturbed by the blow, instead using the momentum of the strike to strike out with her fist.

The punch landed on Sharon’s ribs, and Sharon cried out.

“Get in here!” Bruce yelled.

His hands were shaking, and he could feel the Hulk beginning to stir under his skin, but he cast about desperately for a weapon of some kind, his eyes settling on one of the power drills Tony had been using earlier that day.  He grabbed it, eyeing the fight between Sharon and Natasha as he cautiously stepped out of the lab, hoping that an opening would present itself.

It was a one-sided fight; Sharon was barely holding her own against Natasha, being injured and lacking Natasha’s enhancements.  At the same time, however, Natasha was clearly disoriented, her goal had been narrowed to taking Sharon down, and she didn’t see Bruce coming.

Bruce swung the power drill at her head, wincing as he did so, and she staggered back.  It was enough for Sharon to break away from the fight, and they both retreated to the lab, where the door slid shut.  He nearly collapsed in relief at the hiss of the locking mechanism sliding into place.

Natasha prowled around the door, clearly analyzing it for weak points, but eventually seemed to realize that she wasn’t going to be able to open it.  She turned her gaze, wild and wary, to the two of them.  There was still no recognition there.

Bruce shot Sharon a helpless look, and was unsurprised to see a similarly agonized expression. 

“This is worse than usual,” she whispered.  “I don’t understand it— I don’t even know what could’ve triggered something like this.”

“You don’t think we might have accidentally invoked a trigger word?”

Sharon bit her lip.  “I guess it’s possible…”

“Dr. Banner, Agent Carter.”  Jarvis sounded unusually trite.  “I’ve been asked to inform you that Captain Rogers is in the stairwell.  As the floor is placed on lockdown, however, I am unable to allow him access to this area.”

“That’s probably for the best,” Sharon admitted.  “We don’t need the Black Widow to kill Captain America.”

Her tone was light-hearted, but her voice was choked.  Bruce noticed that she was hunched over and moving slowly, and beckoned for her to lie on one of the work benches.  He went to fetch the first aid kit over near his collection of blood samples, and could feel Natasha’s eyes on him the entire way.

“We don’t need you putting more pressure on your ribs,” he told Sharon.

Sharon grunted.  “Thanks.  Would’ve been better if she hadn’t landed a few punches there.  I think she figured out that those were my weak spots pretty quick.”

The cuts on her face were superficial, and he left those alone while he first checked over the piece of glass embedded in her thigh.  It was wedged deep in her skin, and he gave her some cloth to bite down on while he pulled it out and (after making sure the cut was clear of glass) began stitching it up.  Sharon’s breathing was audible, and her face was ashen.

He gently pressed on her ribs, causing her to suck in air.  “There’s no way to really know how those are until we have access to an x-ray,” he said.  “Just try not to move too much, okay?”

Sharon’s only reply was a short nod.

She tried to rise after he cleaned the cuts on her face, but he put a firm hand on her shoulder and shook his head.  Sharon huffed, giving him the stink-eye, but complied with his silent instruction.

He turned to face Natasha, who was standing and staring at them, hands now loose at her sides.  He was about to stand and fetch a chair when she spoke again, this time in heavily accented English.

“Where is the Madame?”

There was a moment of silence.  Bruce suddenly had a flash of memory— of a woman who was both an antithesis and a mirror of Natasha.  Yelena had spoken little during her imprisonment in Avengers Tower, but he could remember her anecdotes about the woman called Madame B.

When Sharon tried to sit up again, he didn’t stop her.

“She’s not here,” she replied curtly.

Natasha didn’t relax.  In fact, she only seemed to tense up even more.  “Then this is a test.”

“No, it’s not,” Sharon murmurs.  “But you’re never going to believe that.”

Natasha stared at her for a little bit longer, her head cocked to the side in a way that made Bruce even more uneasy.  Then, without warning, her eyes went wide and she collapsed to the floor.  The twitching started not long after that.

“Oh my god.”  Before he could stop her, Sharon was up and hurrying to the door.  “This isn’t normal,” she continued, hitting the lock and opening the door, falling to her knees at Natasha’s side.  The pain of her injuries seemed to be a forgotten memory by now.  “Oh my god, this isn’t— this isn’t normal, it’s not what happened last time—“

Bruce hurried out after her, expecting to see Natasha suddenly lash out at Sharon (he wouldn’t put it past her to pretend to be incapacitated to draw them out), but she did nothing of the sort.  Her eyes were open but sightless once more, and her limbs jerked every 20 seconds or so.

“JARVIS, can you run quick diagnostics?” he asked.  “I need information on vitals.”

There was a moment of silence, during which Bruce had to refrain from grinding his teeth together, before JARVIS replied.

“Her vital signs are unsteady, but she appears to be in no imminent danger.  I believe this to be a mental issue, not a physical one.”

“Fuck,” he muttered.

Sharon shook her head, looking miserable.  “I don’t think she can hear us.  We’ll have to just… wait this out.  I guess.”

That was the worst part of it.  Bruce hated feeling helpless; his worst nightmare was someone he cared about being hurt, and him being able to do nothing about it.  He couldn’t stand the vacant look on Natasha’s face, or that the vibrancy he was so used to seeing from her had utterly vanished.  He couldn’t even bring himself to lecture Sharon on the mistreatment of her injuries.

He just stood over the two of them, wanting to break something. 

It was an eternity.  Minutes turned into hours, and none of them moved from their respective positions.  Though it was early morning, the thought of going to bed made Bruce feel nauseous, and he dismissed the notion as soon as it popped into his head. 

Three hours had passed with no change, when he suddenly remembered when all of this had started in the first place.  He cursed himself for not realizing sooner, and brought his first aid kit out of the lab.  Sharon glanced at him as he started picking bits of glass out of Natasha’s hand, cleaning the cuts with antiseptic.  There was no need for stitches; he merely had to wrap a bandage around it several times.

When he looked up from his work, it was to find Sharon staring at where his hands held Natasha’s injured one.  She met his eyes a moment later before looking away.

The… episode, flashback, whatever it was Natasha was having— came to an anticlimactic end close to five in the morning.  Without warning, Natasha’s eyes slid closed and her limbs stopped the twitching.  Her breathing evened out as well; for once, Bruce had never been so grateful to see someone pass out.

“Jarvis,” he said, noting the exhaustion in his own voice.  “I think we can take the floor off lockdown now.”

* * *

Sharon hadn’t slept for two days straight.  Bruce kept sending her these looks, like he knew that she hadn’t gotten any rest even though she desperately needed it— her ribs were worse off than they had been before the fight, and her expected recovery time from falling off of a building had been extended.  Still, in spite of the near-constant ache from her ribs and thigh, she sat at a kitchen chair in the penthouse, where the rest of the Avengers were gathered.

“We can’t risk this happening again,” Tony was arguing.  “We don’t know what happened.  We don’t know what caused it.  If it happens again— if she gets out next time, and hurts innocent people, or sets off Banner—“

“You’re not giving her enough credit, Tony,” Steve snapped.  “She knows what she’s doing.  Maybe we should ask _her_ , before we establish some new set of rules for her.”

“Funny,” Tony replied.  “She seems like the type who would be all over acknowledging her own faults and preparing for them.”

Sharon wanted to bang her head against the counter.  No one seemed to be overly concerned with Natasha herself— just with what she would _do_.  The moment that that thought crossed her mind, Sharon knew that it wasn’t true, if the stricken looks of the rest of the team were anything to go by.  Even so, it was exhausting to listen to Tony and Steve argue about it.

Before Steve could answer, the elevator doors opened and the subject of conversation stepped out, dressed in yoga pants and a tank top and looking as bad as Sharon felt (in spite of the fact that she’d been mostly sleeping on and off for the past few days).  Natasha barely glanced at any of them, bee-lining for the fridge and pouring herself a glass of water. 

She paused for a moment, catching Sharon’s eye and jerking her head towards the elevator.  Sharon was only too happy to oblige, pointedly not looking at where the Avengers were probably staring at her.

She’d expected a long silence, but to her surprise, Natasha spoke almost as soon as the doors were closed.

“Figured I should tell you,” she said.  “About what happened.  As far as I can understand it.  Before the rest of them find out— because I think you’ll understand better than they will.”

Natasha’s apartment had been Sharon’s place of residence for the first few weeks after her fall, and she settled onto the right side of the couch immediately, careful not to draw her knees to her chest and aggravate her ribs further.  Natasha, as opposed to curling up in her favorite armchair like a kitten, instead took a seat next to her, folding her hands in her lap.

“Well, the long story short is, I got my memories back.”  She stared straight ahead.  “All of them.”

The implications of those words began to sink in for Sharon, as she recalled everything Natasha had told her about how the KGB fucked with her mind— her having two lives crammed into her head (one fake, a happy childhood, and one real, of being knocked down again and again).  How Natasha, after realizing that Yelena knew her, said that even then there must have still been some missing.

“I think,” Natasha continued, “that… I was born in the fifties, maybe?  Madame B. was a lot younger, then.  Yelena was my protégé after I became a seasoned field agent.  Something happened, and they had to completely rewrite my history.  Kept me in isolation so that I couldn’t tell how much time had passed, so that I lost track of the years.  The combination of that and other… methods fooled me into thinking I was a hell of a lot younger than I really am.”

The analysis sounded scientific, and Sharon understood that it was Natasha’s way of coping with it.  But her bile rose at the thought of Natasha, confined for who-knew-how-long, until she lost track of who she was.  Until her years were stolen from her, until she was convinced she was in her twenties for more than twenty years. 

It made her want to punch Madame B. in the face.

Sharon cleared her throat, mouth suddenly dry.  “So you’re, what, 60-something?  Should we be looking at retirement funds for you?”

The look that Natasha sent her was so incredibly relieved that Sharon felt her throat close up, and for a moment she almost had to look away.  Not once had she ever seen Natasha look that open with anyone, including herself.  She understood just how much her instant acceptance meant to Natasha.

“Don’t tell Steve,” Natasha finally croaked.  “He’ll never let me live down all the fossil jokes I’ve made.”

Sharon burst out laughing.  Natasha joined in a moment later.  It was a little bit hysterical, and a little bit broken, but it meant that things were going to be alright.

And if they were still giggling a bit when they went back upstairs to talk to the rest of the Avengers about the incident, well… no one needed to know why.


End file.
